…he cannot be arrested while the Thai parliament is in session — unless the parliament rules otherwise.
The Bangkok Post said the charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years imprisonment and a 20,000 baht fine (US$640).

A machine gun is a fully automatic mounted or portable firearm, usually designed to fire bullets in quick succession from an ammunition belt or magazine, typically at a rate of several hundred rounds per minute.

Which is certainly a more Tarantino-esque image than a small pistol carried by an elected official for personal protection.

Yes, but see how in the article the gun starts out as a machine gun (you know, a thing mounted on a hard point), to a “submachine gun” (sort of tommy gun sized) to a “pistol” in the space of just one paragraph?

That’s QUALITY reporting, that is. The Sunday Sport would be proud.

[Edit: the original CNN article does a lot better: it calls it an UZI, and references the quote.

Given that the quote is from a policeman, rather than from a press aide of the politician, it’s more likely to have been an Uzi machine pistol (which they also make), rather than that they’re just trying to downplay a full-sized Uzi SMG.]

Automatic Weapons: Weapons capable of this may fire in a burst on the shooter’s DEX score. For each shot fired in the burst, raise the attacker’s chance to hit by five percentiles up to double. Roll d100 once for all shots. If the attack roll is a success roll the die type equal to the number of shots (6 shots = d6). The result of this roll determines the number of hits. Only the first bullet impales.

Well yes, but more chances to hit doesn’t really increase accuracy, just your chances of not missing. With the recoil from full or semi-automatic fire you can generally lose a bit of accuracy, not to mention increase the chances of hitting innocent bystanders. I, for one, wouldn’t want someone shooting an Uzi at an assailant that’s standing in front of a group of people, for example, because each bullet fired not only has a chance to miss its target, but also to hit things other than its target, and with decreased accuracy due to recoil those chanes only increase.

That’s why I made that statement, though after reading more about uzis on the wiki earlier it seems the civilian versions are semi-auto, though we don’t know which variant of the gun he was using.

They probably don’t actually need guns for protection, but the senator is from Mae Hong Son province, which borders with Burma/Myanmar and where a lot of drug trafficking occurs.

Armed drug gangs roam the jungle in massive numbers – to the point where the military, which also patrols the jungle, can’t really do anything – and gang activity is relatively high in the cities (though to call them “cities” is something of an overstatement). The military restricts access to quality topographic maps of the area in order to make it difficult for drug gangs to navigate… although if I was able to get my hands on these maps for my geology research (via Chiang Mai University), obviously the drug gangs can get them too.

To the average citizen there really is no danger, and traveling around these places as a tourist or for other purposes as I did isn’t dangerous. You’re more likely to be injured in an automobile/motorbike accident (as I was) than in drug-related violence.

But a politician – one who presumably is trying to do something about the drug problem, even though Thai society is famously corrupt – is a prime target and it does not surprise me that he keeps an Uzi on him.

Also, having met a lot of people from this part of Thailand, you should also understand that they’re rednecks/hicks to the extreme. While gun culture in Thailand is not what it is in redneck parts of the US, taking out your gun in a restaurant to show it off is kind of something you expect to happen in either place, unfortunately.

Reports about this lamentable incident are muddled in conflicting reports.

Even this posting has a conflict, inaccurately saying “machine gun” in the headline but having “pistol” in a quote.

According to a blog posting, based on sleuthing by a pair of journalists, who’ve produced photos from a Thai TV news report, it seems it wasn’t a “submachine gun” after all. Rather, it was an automatic pistol – a handgun. It appears there may have been confusion in the initial press reports because the Israeli-made pistol is sometimes branded as an Uzi, even if it isn’t the infamous submachine gun that most folks associate with the name.

Of course nothing changes the fact that a woman is dead.

However, details are still unclear about exactly who she was – the senator’s secretary, his wife, his ex-wife, his cousin or maybe all the above.

There is also a Mini-Uzi variant. All these firearms are chambered for the 9mm Parabellum round.

None of which takes away from the fact that a Thai politician was criminally irresponsible and a woman died because of it.

I’ve traveled in northern Thailand and guns are prevalent there, as penguinchris pointed out. It’s possible that Boonsong was showing off the gun, because just as in the USA, people do that. Wow, look at my new toy. It might have been an accident. It might not.

But in Thailand, incidents like this are often enveloped in a permanent force-field of impenetrable gauze. Politicians have friends, and often, these friends wield influence.